Harddisk Search and Stats

Having to work with a lot of text on a daily basis might sooner or later require you to review, or want to look for some bits of info in who knows what document. Luckily, specialized applications like Harddisk Search and Stats are fitted with the right means to look through your text files for specific strings, so you don’t have to.

A major advantage is that the application skips you the time, and effort needed to go through a setup process, which means you can use it from the moment download is done, and also carry it around on a thumb drive. What’s more, system registries don’t need to be modified for the search process to work, thus the target PC’s health status remains unchanged.

The visual design is pretty intuitive, with several tabs to set up search parameters, view results, and manage a handful of general application behavior options. A location needs to be specified first of all, but you need to rely on the browse dialog, since drag and drop is not supported, and there’s no integration in the context menu for faster launch.

The default set of supported file formats includes plain text, as well as several web, and programming language types. Luckily, there’s the possibility to add your own, but success rate mostly depends on the application itself. You can choose to either search for filename, or content, which doesn’t necessarily have to be a single word.

Additional filters can be used in order to include files only changed before or after specific time periods, or to match custom size values. It doesn’t take a lot of time for the application to retrieve results, but this mostly depends on the complexity of the target folder, and number of files.

Detected items are all shown in a table along with details like path, filename, type, size, date, and number of occurrences. You can have files opened inside the application’s own text editor, use the Windows default one, or specific the one you prefer.

Statistics are accessible only after at least one search attempt. The level of details matches that of the search results, and all operations you perform are shown. Sadly, exporting needs to be manually done by copying text.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that Harddisk Search and Stats comes in handy for quickly locating text strings inside files of different types. You can customize the list of supported formats, set up additional filters, and open content in an editor of your choice. Although there aren’t any native export options, the application is fast, and manages to live up to expectations overall.